Three poems by Luis Chaves, translated and introduced by Julia Guez and Samantha Zighelboim

Every Sunday for the last twenty-four months, our task as translators has been to keep up with the hyper-caffeinated imagination of Costa Rican poet Luis Chaves, rendering each image in his remarkable new collection of poetry in a way that orients the reader and provides a moment’s stasis and clarity before “the waves come and the waves erase it.”

In Equestrian Monuments, dialogue from The Exorcist co-exists with lines from the Latin Kyrie, Rex. The stately figure of a former president, Leon Cortés, is counterbalanced by a cast of mock-heroic or non-normative foils: a transvestite, a cripple, a singleton, homunculus, thief and gardener. Sweeping statements about entire generations, continents and genres find a basis in the most intimate details of home-life. The intersections are uncanny, sometimes hilarious, often sad and unsettling.

In the original, Chaves contains complex thoughts and feelings with the simplest diction.

Economy of syntax and style is something we’ve worked hard to maintain, while keeping with the ease, colloquialism and play of the Spanish. At the same time, we’ve liberally modulated some of the music in the translation to mirror what is happening in the shape-shifting original. That’s often a question of controlling the cadence of a line by way of enjambment or punctuation.

The weeds growwhen we’re not watching them.Years accumulatewhile we worry about the weeds.Learning this tooklonger than we would have liked.

Luis Chavez

Monumentos Ecuestres was a gift, given to Guez the first time she and Chaves met for Imperial and espresso at the Hotel Costa Rica, sitting on the patio across from the Teatro Nacional, before making their way to the Librería Duluoz nearby. She was in the country on a year-long grant from The Fulbright Commission. This allowed her to spend half of her time in Vargas Arraya—where she and her fiancée rented a small white-walled room in a guest house across from a grocery called Perimercado (which, for years after the name had officially changed, everyone still called Super Cindy). So close to the Universidad de Costa Rica in San Pedro, she wasn’t far from some of the presses—Lanzallamas, Espiral and Germinal—whose work she was there, in part, to research.

After taking in as many readings, salons and festivals in and around the capital as she could, Guez spent the rest of her time living in the small town of Delicias where, half-way up a massive hill, she rented the second story of a house overlooking the Gulf of Nicoya. It was there, on the balcony, that she made the first of three attempts to translate Equestrian Monuments on her own.

She would tinker with individual words and phrases for days. Once satisfied with the literal rendering of a line, weeks and months were then spent bending the overall tone of the translation closer to the original’s.

The project of successfully re-creating the experience of reading Luis Chaves really began to come together when, over drinks at Mercadito in New York City’s East Village, Guez invited Zighelboim into the process of co-translating the collection.

Julia Guez

Our paths crossed for the first time at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. A handful of conversations about poetry we exchanged in 2010 set Guez up to introduce Zighelboim’s work at the annual Thesis Reading that spring. It also gave us a window into one another’s sensibility, what we were reading, writing and translating at the time, and the extent to which we could trust and admire one another’s eye and ear. Most importantly, that small-scale collaboration hinted at the kind of ambition, humor, integrity, persistence and care that would allow us to do some extraordinary work together on a much larger-scale.

Ever since that drink at Mercadito, we have been meeting at one of our two apartments or a café close by almost every week. Beginning with the literal translation, we engaged in a five-part process with each piece.

In the first phase, our aim was simply to be generative. We wanted to come up with as many counterfactuals as we could. All of the options we could create for a given word or phrase were lined up, one after another, separated only by a back-slash. This was our divergent phase, and it was the most playful one.

In our second phase, we wanted to narrow the options down. The trimming would literally halve the size of our drafts. This was our convergent phase, and, of them all, it was the most straightforward.

Then, the goal was to narrow the field of our focus even further (and, at this point, we weren’t tinkering with any of the options we had come up with before). If something didn’t work—even if it was completely accurate, and even if we couldn’t put our finger on why it didn’t attain what Kierkegaard (by way of Walter Lowrie’s translation) called a “primitive lyrical validity” in English—it was highlighted and removed from the list we had bracketed-out before.

Samantha Zighelboim

In the fourth phase of our work, the aim was to create enough distance between ourselves and the text, enough time and space to be able to come back and see everything with new eyes. Sometimes a few minutes—to prepare another gourd of mate or smoke a cigarette outside—would be sufficient. Then we could come back to a passage we had been struggling through, or toggle over to another piece in the collection. Other days, we would take several hours off—to pick up a bottle of wine for dinner, eat, drink then begin again. Several weeks and months would pass between drafts of the trickiest poems in the collection.

In the final phase of our work together, our aim was to dilate moments in the text that simply didn’t sound right to us. Unsatisfied with the options we had generated so far, we gave ourselves greater permission vis a vis inserting or eliding something in the English to protect the flow of a line (without altering its meaning and, likely, only adding to its plausibility).

“The waves come and the waves erase it” is one example. We repeated the word, “waves,” to maintain the lilt of the phrase, (“y las olas vienen y la borran”), and to convey the sense of ritual and repetition that is at the heart of this particular section of the poem. At this phase of the process, raindrops were finally “veining” the window. The crickets “came on,” after “the fog cleared.” And “the sky’s own white stone path” was chosen in lieu of cloud-like rolling stones (which, every way we attempted to render up to this point, was clichéd, distracting and allusive in the English in a way the Spanish didn’t mean to be). By the end of this phase, we had worked through the most important decision-points in the text. Everything we had pressure-tested, memorizing, reciting and tinkering with for months, still pleased us; it still worked, even though it didn’t always feel perfect.

In the introduction to Madame Bovary, Lydia Davis explains that she didn’t read any other translations until after she finished a first draft of her own. “In the second draft, I had ten others on hand, eventually an eleventh, the most recent. I made extensive comparisons in difficult passages, curious to learn what ingenious solutions might have been found to the various cruxes.”

Our admiration for one another as writers and as people, the trust we have for one another as co-translators and friends, our commitment to question every choice we have made, to consider and reconsider it almost compulsively, has allowed us to do what Davis was doing (in virtual conversation with other translators) in real-time. And it has helped us land on solutions to the various “cruxes” we’ve encountered in the course of co-translating Equestrian Monuments that neither one of us could have come up with on our own.

In our own translations then “provincia” has become “suburb”, and “Acetaminofén” is “Tylenol.” “La Virgen Criolla,” however, is still “La Virgen Criolla.” There are slippery, strange or foreign references in the original, and we attempt to make them feel the same way in our translation. That is part of a mystery we don’t, in any way, intend to clarify or solve for in this text: a necessary strangeness.

Santa Teresa, 2006

by Luis Chaves

A few days and nights in Malpaís and Santa Teresa. I saw the pelicans, the threat of falling coconuts, I saw coatis, whales, iguanas, herons and some fish—blue, miniscule and phosphorescent—swimming in pools that form among the rocks at low-tide. Also the seagulls who followed us onto the deck of the ferry so that we’d feed them highly-processed snacks. I saw friends, I saw friends’ children. I saw friends and friends’ children light a bonfire in the night and fulfill this ritual that’s been with us for who knows how long. I saw the ocean each night before I’d fall asleep and I saw it each morning when I’d wake up. I saw a multi-colored comet still against the clean sky, I saw the invisible string that seemed to sustain it reach almost to my own hands. I saw hermit crabs of all sizes surrounding me while I pissed on the sand. I saw, in the bottom of the backpack, the spine of a Dos Passos novel I hadn’t even gotten around to opening. I saw objects the sea deposits on the shore: a stone in the shape of a cassette tape, a branch in the shape of a lantern, a beer can in the shape of a beer can. One afternoon I closed my eyes and saw the blur of so many past trips, imagining future visits to this very coast. This is how it is. Life can be reduced to a short list.